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"Attached at the Heart" Updated Edition

"Attached at the Heart" is the definitive resource on Attachment Parenting, refined through 23 years of research and parent-to-parent support. Now this primary text for API Leaders has been released in an updated edition. Purchase it from your favorite retailer.

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We can nurture our children for a more compassionate world

Families struggle every day with parenting and lack of support. Find connection, relationships, and basic principles that can make a difference in your home and the world.

The truth is...

when we strengthen families, we nurture and fulfill our children's need for trust, respect, and affection, and ultimately provide a lifelong foundation for healthy, enduring relationships.

API promotes parenting practices that create strong, healthy emotional bonds between children and their parents. For life. So they can take those bonds with them into their adult lives and share them with their children. And their children can do the same. A life cycle of compassion and connection.

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What is Attachment?

Dedicated individuals, and The Phil and Reedy Hickey Fund for the Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta, The Iowa Foundation for Education, the Environment and the Arts, Cole-Belin Education Foundation, and The Columbus Foundation

is to educate and support all parents in raising secure, joyful, and empathic children in order to strengthen families and create a more compassionate world.

In this issue of Attached Family, we examine shame versus guilt and how shame contributes to emotional trauma. We look at the intersect of parenting and shame, keeping in mind that shame is a normal emotional response to certain social situations, but like anger or disappointment, when unresolved, shame can lead to lifelong difficulties.

"What Makes Emotional Trauma? Fear, Disconnect and Shame," an interview with Daniela Sieff, PhD -- explores the ingredients to developing a shame-based view of oneself and what is all involved in healing, which certainly underlines the importance of prevention through parenting

"Parenting as a Protest Against Hate" by Lauren Gottschalk-Scher, fashion designer -- looks at how parenting can be activism

Your Attached Family: Loving Uniquely Issue

Attachment Parenting is about loving each of our children as individuals with unique character traits. But this can be difficult to do in a culture that increasingly blames behavior on disorders and difficult temperament.

"Difficult" and "different" are not synonymous with "disordered"...

In this issue of Attached Family, we delve into temperament and how it intersects with parenting and the development of attachment style, and we challenge the notion that every hard-to-handle child needs a diagnosis.

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What People Say about API

I want you to know I had an amazing time [at the Cherishing Parents, Flourishing Children symposium]. We had to leave Sunday but wished I could have stayed for the last two days. It was humbling to be around so many speakers, founders, leaders, doctors, staff and mo